Thank you for being a Gates Notes Insider. I feel lucky that I get to connect with so many people like you. – Bill Gates

Not a Gates Notes Insider yet? Sign up

spacer

LOG IN

SIGN UP

EMAILPASSWORD

Forgot?

Log in

Or sign up with your social account:

Log in

Log in

Logout:

Become a Gates Notes Insider

Become a Gates Notes Insider

Join the Gates Notes community to access exclusive content, comment on stories, participate in giveaways, and more.

Already joined? Log in

spacer

LOG IN

SIGN UP

Sign up with your social account:

Sign up

Sign up

Or sign up with email:

TITLE

FIRST NAME

LAST NAME

EMAIL

This email is already registered. Enter a new email, try signing in or retrieve your password

PASSWORD

ADDRESS

Why are we collecting this information? Gates Notes may send a welcome note or other exclusive Insider mail from time to time. Additionally, some campaigns and content may only be available to users in certain areas. Gates Notes will never share and distribute your information with external parties.

ADDRESS LINE 1

Bill may send you a welcome note or other exclusive Insider mail from time to time. We will never share your information.

ADDRESS LINE 2

CITY

STATE / PROVINCE / REGION

ZIP / POSTAL CODE

COUNTRY

Sign up

Join the Gates Notes community to access exclusive content, comment on stories, subscribe to your favorite topics and more.We will never share or spam your email address. For more information see our Sign Up FAQ.By clicking "Sign Up" you agree to the Gates Notes Terms of Use / Privacy Policy.

Deactivating your account will unsubscribe you from Gates Notes emails, and will remove your profile and account information from public view on the Gates Notes. Please allow for 24 hours for the deactivation to fully process. You can sign back in at any time to reactivate your account and restore its content.

Deactivate My Acccount

Go Back

Your Gates Notes account has been deactivated.

Come back anytime.

Welcome back

In order to unsubscribe you will need to sign-in to your Gates Notes Insider account

Once signed in just go to your Account Settings page and set your subscription options as desired.

Sign In

Request account deletion

We’re sorry to see you go. Your request may take a few days to process; we want to double check things before hitting the big red button. Requesting an account deletion will permanently remove all of your profile content. If you’ve changed your mind about deleting your account, you can always hit cancel and deactivate instead.

Submit

Cancel

Thank You! Your request has been sent

Please complete your account verification. Resend verification email.

This verification token has expired.

Your email address has been verified. Update my profile.

Your account has been deactivated. Sign up to re-activate your account.

All Hail the Condom King

I’ve never met anyone who knows how to have as much fun with condoms (in public, anyway) as Mechai Viravaidya.

The social activist from Thailand has fashioned the contraceptives into colorful hats, dresses, shirts, suits and other sartorial creations. (Mechai once gave my dad a baseball hat made from hundreds of condoms. He wore the cap at our foundation’s annual meeting, earning big laughs from the staff.) He’s started school contests to see who could inflate a condom into the biggest balloon, persuaded Buddhist monks to bless them with holy water, and convinced police to hand them out on the street (a program he dubbed “cops and rubbers”).

All this fun had a serious goal—to destigmatize contraceptives in a culture where talking about safe sex and family planning was taboo. Mechai’s efforts have been so successful that he is affectionately known as “Mr. Condom,” or “The Condom King,” in Thailand.

Mechai never sought this condom crown. Born in Thailand to a Scottish mother and Thai father—both of whom were doctors—Mechai trained as an economist and started his career at Thailand’s economic planning agency. It was there that Mechai discovered that his country was experiencing alarming population growth. At the time, the average Thai family had seven children and the annual population growth rate was over 3 percent. Most women didn’t have—or even know about—basic birth control.

Worried about Thailand’s future, Mechai decided to launch an organization called the Population and Community Development Association (PDA) in 1974 to promote family planning. From the start, he took an unorthodox approach to promoting safe sex. At the time, Thailand had few doctors, so PDA trained nurses and midwives to educate couples about family planning strategies. In a country where most people were uneasy discussing sex, Mechai pushed the conversation out into the open. He made contraceptives readily available from the smallest roadside stand to the biggest stores and taught people that there was no reason to be shy about talking about sexual health. He won over his audiences with humor, using condoms as batons in school relay races and hosting vasectomy festivals where men were rewarded with a free hot dog for undergoing the procedure. Thanks to these and other efforts, Thailand’s annual population growth fell from 3.2 percent to less than 1 percent today.

Mechai’s work with PDA helped prepare Thailand for its biggest health challenge of the 1980s and 1990s: HIV/AIDS. When the AIDS epidemic came to Thailand, Mechai and PDA responded with prevention programs targeting those at greatest risk, including sex workers and their clients. PDA launched roving HIV testing vans and established AIDS education theme nights in the country’s red-light districts.

Later appointed head of Thailand’s national HIV program, Mechai continued to challenge taboos in Thai culture by persuading taxi drivers to hand out condoms to their passengers and launch attention-grabbing safe sex campaigns, including condom ads painted on to the side of elephants. Believing that everyone needed to be involved in the health challenge facing Thailand, he partnered with the military to run public service announcements about HIV on the radio. Thailand became one of the first countries in the world to achieve a decline in HIV infections. New cases of HIV decreased by 90 percent from 1991 to 2003.

“The world can continue to learn from Mechai’s efforts to expand access to contraceptives.”

The world can continue to learn from Mechai’s efforts to expand access to contraceptives. Far too many people become infected with HIV each year. Too often, the people facing the greatest risk—including young women, sex workers, men who have sex with men and people who use drugs—do not have access to the contraceptives they need to protect themselves.

Better access to contraceptives is also critical for family planning. When couples have access to contraceptives—including ones that women control, unlike condoms—they are more likely to have smaller families, women are freer to work outside the home, and fewer women die from unsafe abortions or pregnancy-related complications. Communities benefit too because parents can devote more resources to their children’s health and education—setting them up for more productive futures.

Mechai’s contributions to Thailand have gone well beyond his success promoting family planning and HIV prevention. He was elected three times to serve in Thailand’s senate. To raise money for PDA, he launched a chain of restaurants named Condoms and Cabbages (because condoms should be as plentiful as cabbages in Thailand, he says). The restaurant’s motto is “our food won’t make you pregnant.” He also started a school and fought rural poverty through a village development program to support community entrepreneurship and empowerment.

Mechai’s extraordinary life and work in global health and development has helped improve the lives of millions of people in Thailand. And the Thai people have thanked him with an honor that is perhaps the greatest measure of his impact. When people in Thailand want a condom, they don’t call it a condom. Instead, they refer to it by the name of the man who taught them the importance of using one—they ask for a “Mechai.”